Near‐Field Coupling of Janus Dipoles Beyond Polarization Locking

Chan Wang, Yuhan Zhong, Xuhuinan Chen, Huaping Wang, Tony Low, Hongsheng Chen, Baile Zhang, Xiao Lin

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Polarization, as a fundamental property of light, plays a key role in many phenomena of near-field coupling, namely the coupling of source's evanescent waves into some guided modes. As a typical example of the polarization-locked phenomenon in the near-field coupling, the Janus dipole has the orientation of its near-field coupling face intrinsically determined by the polarization state of linearly-polarized surface waves, specifically whether they are transverse-magnetic (TM) or transverse-electric (TE) surface waves. Here, a mechanism to achieve the directional near-field coupling of Janus dipoles beyond polarization locking by leveraging hybrid TM-TE surface waves is presented. These hybrid surface waves, as eigenmodes with both TM and TE wave components, can be supported by optical interfaces between different filling materials inside a parallel-plate waveguide. Under the excitation of hybrid surface waves, it is found that the coupling and non-coupling face of a Janus dipole may be switched, if the Janus dipole itself rotates in a plane parallel to the designed optical interface between different filling materials, without resorting to the change of surface-wave polarization. The underlying mechanism is due to the capability of hybrid surface waves to extract both the source's TM and TE evanescent waves, which offers an alternative paradigm to regulate the interference in the near-field coupling.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number2301035
JournalLaser and Photonics Reviews
Volume18
Issue number10
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 Wiley-VCH GmbH.

Keywords

  • parallel-plate waveguides
  • Janus dipoles
  • near-field directionality
  • hybrid TM-TE surface waves
  • polarization locking

MRSEC Support

  • Partial

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